The History of the
Rohan Theatre

The Rohan Theatre has always been an unusual kind of theatre, indeed some have questioned whether it should be called a theatre at all, as it hasn’t been associated with a specific building, nor has it put on conventional performances, since the collapse of the original Rohan Theatre building in 1892. Nonetheless, its works are well known and have influenced the evolution of European culture for the past century.

It was founded in 1891 by five disenchanted poets (Rebus Kraven, Oliver Coffyn, Count Eric Stenbock (known to his friends as Harry), Frances Featherstone (known to his friends as Alex), and Niles Alain – a disgraced Holborn undertaker) who met in the decadent atmosphere of late Victorian Brighton, and were troubled, each for his own reasons, by the increasing complacency of audiences, and the self-satisfied grandiosity of contemporary performers, such as Sir Henry Irving. They vowed to create a new kind of theatre, one where art did not imitate life, but life imitated art. (The name “Rohan” is an acronym derived from the first names of the original founders – Rebus, Oliver, Harry, Alex and Niles, as initialed on the original manifesto of 1891).

Their original manifesto (amended in 1906) was secretly printed in August 1891 and was rapidly distributed amongst various underground networks of radical artists right across the continent, many of whom saw the Rohan Theatre as a justification for larger scale social agitation. By 1901 it was the largest underground anonymous association of thinkers, poets, painters, musicians and aesthetes in Europe.

Among the first successes of the Rohan Theatre was Harry Stenbock’s “Petit Comte”. For the last 3 years of his life (1892-1895) he was accompanied everywhere he went by a life-size wooden doll, which he referred to as “Le Petit Comte”. He would behave towards this doll in every way as if it were his son and heir. The “Theatre” was not his own knowing performance, but that of all those around him who, because he was a Count, or because they thought him both rich and mad, would also treat the doll as if it were real. He even paid a Jesuit minister to educate the “Petit Comte”, and would sit and watch the poor man for hours as he attempted to drill the doll in Greek and Latin. This single example gives a clear indication of the nature and spirit of the Rohan Theatre, although, of course not all projects work over such a long period of time.

Another, now infamous, example of a performance by the Rohan Theatre was the staged riot at the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”. Performed in collaboration with Diagilev Najinsky, and Stravinsky himself, who had in the past contributed to a number of Rohan Theatre productions, the riot was initially started by four actors, whose abusive shouts were written by Featherstone and whose “fisticuffs” were choreographed by Najinsky. The Rohan Theatre performance began once the audience were drawn into the fight, and then still further with press reports, and the building of the myth of the “riot at the Rite”. In many ways this performance is still ongoing.

Among other famous participants in Rohan Theatre productions was Agatha Christie, who approached the then Artistic Director, Roger Ashcombe in August 1926, in a misguided attempt to gain artistic and intellectual credibility, offering her services as a writer. The resultant production entitled “The Disappearance” was staged in December 1926 and immediately caught the imagination of the press, as indeed it was carefully calculated to do. In 1979 a fictionalised account of Miss Christie’s alleged disappearance was made into a film starring Vanessa Redgrave thus demonstrating the lasting success of this particular production.

Possibly the most bizarre project to be carried through by the Rohan Theatre was the much celebrated “Encounter with the Death of Art”, a cryptic production staged over five nights in January 1955 at the then largely neglected Highgate Cemetery. Having recently acquired a new patron in Sir Henry Beard (inheritor of London’s largest stone import and masonry business: Beards) both his money and his workforce were quickly enlisted in a scheme that David Epney, the then Acting Artistic Director, had been planning for many years, and that remains, even today, one of the most remarkable feats of stealth engineering ever conducted in a cemetery. Between January 5th and 10th (working from midnight to 4am on each night) a team of 27 men under Epney’s direction intended to exchange every named gravestone with a near identical copy. Only the inscriptions were different, as each one was dedicated to the death and memory of “Art”, and quoted a line from Frances Featherstone’s monumental “Encyclopedia of Cemetery Euphemisms”. Regrettably they had only managed two fifths of the West Cemetery before they were caught and arrested. Beard got off lightly, being ordered to replace the original stones at his own cost, and pay substantial damages to Highgate Borough Council for the future upkeep of the cemetery. Epney was sentenced to five years for Criminal Damage, Vandalism and the Desecration of Mortal Monuments, and served seven, due to a number of artistic disagreements with the Prison Governor. Yet, even so, in his autobiography “Here Lies David Epney” he claimed it to be his greatest triumph.

The 1960s proved to be difficult years for the Rohan Theatre as changes in social structures and attitudes spawned many organisations and “movements” whose aims and ideals were strikingly similar, some might even say “borrowed”, thus pushing the ever-anonymous Rohan productions to the sidelines. Its invention of the notorious “Spontaneous Happening” in 1958 was quickly seized upon, and later denigrated, by the Hippie movement, and its attempts at entering the film industry by creating provocative hoaxes designed to inspire debate backfired when the public believed them wholesale without applying any degree of critical judgment. By 1975 it was becoming apparent that the Rohan Theatre, as it was, had become irrelevant to contemporary culture, ironically because its very ideas and aesthetic had been so embraced by society, albeit in a corrupted and bowdlerised form, that it no longer had a role to play itself. On September 9th 1976, during a meeting of its Artistic Directors, which lasted a full 73 hours, it was decided that the Rohan Theatre should cease to be, by a vote of 64% with 30% against and 6% abstentions. The majority of its leading lights went on to use their skills in the then growing PR industries, with varying degrees of success, however, in June 1977 a number of those who had voted against the disbandment founded the New Rohan Theatre, with an updated and somewhat radicalised manifesto which, to this day, is known only to those who have been invited to join.

Many leading 20th century artists have acknowledged their debt of inspiration to the Rohan Theatre over the years, and some have commemorated it (in a veiled but nonetheless distinct manner) in their works. Among these, the most important references are in Herman Hesse’s novel “Steppenwolf” and Franz Kafka’s “America”. Both of these references play on the Rohan Theatre’s essential blurring of where theatre starts and reality stops. Hesse is himself thought to have been involved in a Rohan Theatre performance in June 1926, and the “Magic Theatre” that appears throughout “Steppenwolf” with the flickering electric sign “For Madmen Only” or “Entrance Not For Everybody” is clearly a reference to the Rohan Theatre. Franz Kafka’s “Oklahoma Theatre” plays a similar role in his novel “America” and the conclusion can only be the same, although there is no evidence of Kafka’s direct involvement with the Rohan Theatre.

To recognise a performance by the Rohan Theatre would be to undermine its very nature, and hence its shows are always credited to others. If you think you have seen a performance by the Rohan Theatre, you are either mistaken, or the performance was a failure.